Pike's Peak

Bond girl, Austen heroine, Dolly bird: Rosamund Pike has embodied every kind of British feminine ideal. Now, she's ready to ascend the heights of Hollywood with a series of films that showcase her true talent: raw power.

"Don't call me Roz!" Rosamund Pike announcesfrom the top step of a cottage in Beckley Park, a lordly hunting lodge built by a treasurer of King Henry VIII. Pike floats past in a silk organza trumpet dress from Zac Posen. "Can you imagine a more dreadful name: Roz Pike?" She climbs into a van heading to the topiary garden, then gives me a look full of her captivatingly English brand of beauty: direct, serious, headstrong--the look you see in Gainsborough's portrait of Mrs. Sheridan, say, or George Romney's Lady Hamilton. "That's not my name. And I've gotten old enough that I can defend it."

Honestly, I never did call her Roz. She'd spotted a shorthand heading in my notes from a good 15 feet away, and it was the sniperlike eyesight that caught me off guard, not the flash of pique. But the 32-year-old actress seems primed, starting now, to set the record straight. In October she stars, with Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson, in The Big Year, and she's following that up with a big year of her own, one that should greatly increase her profile with American audiences. She just wrapped production on The Wrath of the Titans, in which she plays Andromeda opposite Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson. And this fall she starts shooting One Shot, with Tom Cruise. "I feel this will be the year that changed my life," she tells me later that evening when we duck into a sushi restaurant in Oxford. "I feel like I'm getting to be good at what I do."

According to Paul Giamatti, her co-star in last year's Barney's Version, she was already "beyond superlative." But Pike, the child of opera singers and a happy participant in their itinerant lifestyle until she won a scholarship to Badminton School (the alma mater of Indira Gandhi and Iris Murdoch), at the age of 11, deflects such compliments. For instance, she wants me to know she is not fluent in German and French, as others have written. "I think someone has looked at my A levels"--the British equivalent of the AP exams--"and translated that into a sort of perfection."

The myth of perfection hasn't exactly hurt her career. She made her film debut, at 21, playing one version--the icy, omnicompetent double agent Miranda Frost in Die Another Day. She followed up that turn as a Bond girl by taking on another archetype of British cinema, portraying a marriageable young woman from a Jane Austen novel, in Pride and Prejudice. Within a few years, Pike and the director of that movie, Joe Wright, had gotten engaged. Then, in 2008, during a period when the couple were often together in L.A. as he filmed The Soloist, Wright suddenly called it off. I tell her about a dear friend of mine who went through nearly the same thing (on the day she was going to buy her wedding gown). Now I work a few blocks from the jerk who ended it, and it's hard to imagine not taking a swing at the guy when I see him. What, I ask, would she advise? Pike laughs. "You're being quite clever," she says. "A bit like Hannibal Lecter." She launches into creepy-mode Anthony Hopkins: "You must be very interesting in private life, Clarice."

Pike just tosses off the imitation, casually, chopsticks in hand, the way a trained singer might hum a melody. This chameleonic quality is an economic asset, of course, since Hollywood mainly has roles for actors who sound American, as she does in The Big Year. "To see her so different..." Owen Wilson says admiringly. "As somebody who can't really change my accent or my ways, I'm always impressed by that."

In fact, the accidents of her love life have less to tell us about Rosamund Pike than do her early years traveling from one opera gig to another, an only child on the road with her parents. She remembers those years vividly, studying the singers onstage and off--their acting styles and affairs, but also their worries about money. In almost the same breath that she confesses her pride at having parents who were artists, she admits to feeling privileged now to understand the value of money. "I grew up accounting for every penny," she says. "I know exactly what it's like to have no money. As you start moving in more privileged circles, you see so many people who place no real value on or pleasure in earning their own money. I think it's second to none: earning it and spending it, deciding what to do with it."

It's a refreshingly candid admission, a testament to her growing self-certainty. Giamatti characterizes her as smart, uncomplicated, really tall, strangely beautiful, easy to work with, and, he adds, an oddball. When I ask how so, he remembers inquiring about a trip she took from Montreal to Vermont during a break in the shoot. He thought she'd gone hiking or leaf-peeping, but Pike said she'd instead spent the time working on a goat cheese farm with some Ethiopian refugees she'd just met.

"Women are sometimes not allowed to have their pure, raw power," she explains. Theater directors have tapped into Pike's ample reserves more often than their film colleagues have (she has recently played both Madame de Sade and Hedda Gabler on the British stage). But that may be changing. Jonathan Liebesman, her director in The Wrath of the Titans, wanted her to keep Braveheart in mind for her performance as Andromeda--not the Sophie Marceau character but the bloodthirsty Mel Gibson. She took the advice to heart, and even after a day of dress-up her identification sounds personal. "If you ever need a man to rescue you," she says, "you make damn sure you never have to be rescued again. You can take care of yourself."